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Posts Tagged ‘Screenshot’

Chatroulette Being Used for Marketing? Say It Ain’t So!

That didn’t long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to contest rules, participants are asked if they can “conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette” by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to protests, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)

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According to the initial company blog post about the contest, “if you rise above the seas of failing men and charm a woman on Chatroulette,” the company promises to give you a voucher worth 250 pounds which you can spend at the company’s retail stores. The blog post then provides an example of what they mean by a “seduction attempt” by way of a screenshot of a Chatroulette chat session – and be warned, it’s not what we would consider safe for work. Instead, what French Connection is promoting is essentially a nod to the often perverse nature of the popular webcam-surfing site.

Chatroulette for Marketing: Risky or Brilliant?

Although the French Connection brand may pride themselves on their youthful, hip nature, it’s an arguably risky move to promote themselves via a service as odd, off-the-wall, and yes, occasionally very disturbing as Chatroulette. Like Casey Neistat recently explained in a charming video demo of this latest Internet craze, on any given day, Chatroulette is 71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert.

In fact, it’s the possibility of running into something odd – or rather someone odd doing something odd- that makes Chatroulette so exciting for its users. Like the game of Russian Roulette from which its name is derived, most of the time nothing remarkable happens – you run into another bored voyeur looking back and you and maybe even have a casual conversation. But every now and then…bang!

And it’s the bang that seems to appeal to French Connection. They want to send out their customers into the wild, wild west of Chatroulette to become the very sort of creepy perverts that make the site so darned intriguing. So now, dear Chatroulette users, you’ll have to wonder whether that freaky guy/gal hitting on you is doing so because they’re actually a weirdo or if they’re just trying to win a few bucks to spend at a clothing store.

Thanks to French Connection’s bravery, they have the honor of being the first brand to attempt using Chatroulette for marketing purposes. However, if the contest goes well (i.e., it generates a lot of press), other marketers will likely soon follow suit.

Is that a good thing? We’re not so sure. At least, it’s not good for us, the Chatroulette surfers. Marketers, though, may think it’s a downright brilliant move. And maybe it is – after all, who would have thought that anyone could have figured out how to promote a brand on a service like this? Still, we sort of wish the marketers would leave this one alone. Stick to Facebook and Twitter and the other straight-laced social sites of the Internet – leave Chatroulette and all its unrestricted debauchery alone.

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Oops: TiVo Premiere won’t have Comcast On Demand

This TiVo Premiere screenshot with a large Comcast On Demand logo on it certainly set a few hearts aflutter yesterday when it was released from the company, but our dreams have turned into bitter, bitter ashes: TiVo tells us this screenshot is actually just a mockup and not indicative of any actual partnership. And double-oops: that other interesting screenshot with “Friends Recommend” on the Browse screen is also a mockup, meaning our hopes for some social-media integration have also been dashed, at least for now. Oh well. Let’s hope our forthcoming Premiere review units can somehow turn these frowns upside-down.

Continue reading Oops: TiVo Premiere won’t have Comcast On Demand

Oops: TiVo Premiere won’t have Comcast On Demand originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mac 101: How to use the iTunes parental controls

Filed under: iTunes, Mac 101

As Apple removes sexually suggestive apps from the App Store (and is evidently preparing a Red Light District for the future), users are wondering how they can protect their kids from certain content. With that in mind, here’s an overview of the parental controls in iTunes.

Note that the screenshot at right is from iTunes 9.0.3. Older versions look slightly different. Parental controls are only available in iTunes 5 and later.

To access these settings, select Preferences from the iTunes menu, and then click the Parental tab. Here you’ve got several options.

First, you can disable access to podcasts, internet radio or the iTunes Store completely. Note that you can keep iTunes U accessible while disabling the rest of the store. Additionally, you can deny access to shared libraries. Once turned off, these items won’t appear in the left sidebar of the iTunes window.

Next, a drop-down menu lets you apply the content ratings systems from one of several countries to your own machine. From there, you can apply more fine-grained content restrictions. For example, if you’ve opted to use the US’s ratings system, you can limit access to movies that are rated G, PG, PG-13 or R. Television shows can be limited in the same way (TV-Y, TV-Y7, etc.).

As for apps, there are four ratings, no matter which country’s system you’ve selected: 4+, 9+, 12+ and 17+.

If you want even tighter restriction, select “Restrict explicit content.” This won’t let users preview, purchase or subscribe to content in the store that’s been marked as explicit by the content providers.

Once you’re done, click the lock to prevent further changes and provide your machine’s administrator password (which your kids don’t know, right?).

All of these changes must be set up for each user account that will have limited access. Also, changes made in iTunes on a Mac will apply to a mobile device (iPod touch or iPhone) that’s tied to that same limited account. In other words, Jr. won’t be able to use the mobile App Store to download apps that the desktop version denies.

TUAWMac 101: How to use the iTunes parental controls originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google, Mozilla Claim AOL’s China Portal May Harm Your Computer

Google Chrome and Firefox both throw up a malware warning for AOL’s Chinese portal (click at your own risk), and Google even warns people who run a search for ‘AOL China’ that the site may harm their computer, as you can tell from the screenshot above.

As far as I can tell, Internet Explorer 8 (with Protected Mode turned on), Bing and Yahoo Search don’t flag anything out of the ordinary with the website. Curiously, neither does AOL Search, which is powered by Google.

I continued to the site, which is located at both chinese.aol.com and cn.aol.com, and the warning message tells me the website is getting flagged because it contains elements from the site www.tq121.com.cn, which is said to appear to host malware. The URL www.tq121.com.cn earlier led me to weather.com.cn, but no warning messages pop up when visiting that site.

Digging a bit deeper, I found that the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for chinese.aol.com reports the domain name tq121.com.cn to function as intermediary for distributing malware hosted at xzgfgh.8866.org. (Best not to visit any of those, obviously).

Looking at the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for the latter URL turns up red flags for sited hosted on the network The Planet, a hosting company that is suffering from a couple of security issues of its own at the moment, as you can tell from similar warning messages appearing when visiting legacy domain domains.theplanet.com.

We’re sure that these are just pieces of a bigger puzzle, but it’s definitely worth reporting that a website owned by an Internet company the size of AOL appears to be used to distribute malware. And frankly, it’s worrying that Google and Firefox both raise warning flags while behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo consider everything to be perfectly safe.

(Thanks for the tips, Michel Wester and Andrew Hartnett)

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As It Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday, Facebook Surges To 400 Million Users

It’s been six years to the day that Facebook launched, and the company’s massive growth is showing no signs of slowing down. Minutes ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a note to the site’s blog celebrating the milestone. In it, he says that Facebook will cross the 400 million user mark this week. And it’s been less than five months since the social network hit 300 million.

To celebrate, the company is holding its own version of a party — it’s Hackathon time. That means all of the company’s engineers are about to embark on all night coding sessions. Previous Hackathons have given birth to things like Facebook Video and its new HipHop PHP converter. Zuckerberg also says that we’ll be seeing some new product launches tonight (we’ll be covering them as soon as each goes live).

In light of the event, here’s a collection of screenshots of Facebook profiles and homepages from the last few years (Facebook actually put most of this gallery together in honor of its fifth birthday, but it’s always fun to look back at how far the site has come). Also note that the last screenshot in the timeline has its days numberd — Facebook is currently rolling out another redesign.

A lot has changed, much of it for the better. But I still miss the glory days when a poke took up a quarter of my screen.

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Sidebar Delivers Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Android

We recently wrote about Sidebar, an app that wants to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. Sidebar is debuting its first app and guess what? It’s not an iPhone app-it’s an Android app! While Sidebar’s Android app is built for all Google-powered Android phones, the app has been configured specially for the newly released Verizon Droid. Android users can download the app here.

Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you. Content consists of videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later.

While the Android Market no doubt needs an improvement, its promising that nifty apps like Sidebar are coming to the Android before hopping on the iPhone train. We’ve seen Sobees and Seesmic take a similar approach. Because the iPhone market is so saturated, it could make sense for developers to perhaps gain a following from other smartphone users, and perfect their iPhone offerings in the meantime.

Sidebar seems like a compelling app for an Android user. Although the number of apps on the Android Market doesn’t yet reach the magnitude of content on Apple’s App Store, there still is a value in receiving customized recommendations for mobile content. Android’s app store features top paid and free apps, but doesn’t have an in-depth personalized recommendation feature that competes with Sidebar. And the app suggests other types of mobile content, like ringtones, videos, news and more.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Is Bing Cashback Costing Users Money? Sometimes, Yes

When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers.

As we told you last month when discussing the program’s early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls “negative cashback.” How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.

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The problem may lie with Bing’s ability to accurately track website changes or with Bing’s relationships with retailers or with the basic values of the retailers themselves, but one way or another, the system seems to be gamed.

Essentially, certain products from certain websites appear through a Cashback-enabled browser to be a certain price. Yet, if the same user visits the same site at the same time from a non-Cashback browser or machine (or if he deletes his cookies), the price is sometimes drastically different in a way that benefits the end user not a bit.

As one user very succinctly put it, “If I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%.”

We did the same search, and we saw the same results. Here’s our Bing Cashback screenshot from an Internet Explorer window:

And here’s the same product on the same website in a Chrome tab:

As a side note, the blogger that alerted us to this issue had previously received a nastygram from Microsoft about his post on Bing Cashback technical issues.

So, what do we make of this issue? Is it a potentially scammy technical glitch? More importantly, how soon can it be fixed so innocent online shoppers aren’t quietly swindled out of cash throughout the holiday season? Let us know what you think should be done in the comments – particularly if you’ve noticed this bug yourself.

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Twitter Turns On Geolocation API. Not For Twitter.com Just Yet.

Back in August, Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet.

This means that applications that have been buit using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

As you can see in the screenshot, there is a new “Enable geotagging” option in the Settings menu on Twitter. It’s important to note that this feature is entirely opt-in. There is also a button to delete all your location data if you feel the need to do that. The process apparently takes up to 30 minutes to complete.

It’s worth noting that Twitter snuck in a post about its new privacy policy just before the Geolocation post. For those interested, find the updated policy here. Twitter says it basically just updated the language to account for the new location functionality.

Location appears to be a big part of Twitter’s strategy going forward. Not only do they have the Geolocation API, but they have a new API to serve up better Trending Topics based on location.

In his blog post, Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver notes, “This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet.” “Yet” is the key word there. Given the extensive UI changes Twitter has undergone in the past few weeks with features like Lists and now Retweets being added, it shouldn’t be that surprising that Twitter is choosing not to roll this out on the main site right now. But you can be sure it will be a part of the experience eventually.

Developers interested in Geolocation should also look at the notes left today in the Twitter API Google Group.

Twitter has a good sense of timing with this rollout as our Realtime Crunchup is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco, and Sarver will be a part of our panel talking about geolocation. It’s good that he now has something to talk about.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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